A robust multi stage technique for image binarization of degraded historical documents

Document image binarization is a central problem in many document analysis systems. Indeed, it represents one of the basic challenges, especially in case of historical documents analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel robust multi stage framework that combines different existing document image thresholding methods for the purpose of getting a better binarization result. CLAHE technique is introduced to significantly enhance contrast in some poor images. The proposed method then uses a hybrid algorithm to partition image into foreground and background. A special procedure is finally applied in order to remove small noise and correct characters morphology. Experimental results prove the accuracy and the efficiency of our approach on document images binarization over three popular datasets compared to some well-known methods in literature.